


sharp and silent

by Duck_Life



Series: Femslash February 2019 [3]
Category: Generation X (Comic)
Genre: Autistic Character, F/F, Femslash February, Muteness, POV Second Person, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-06
Updated: 2019-02-06
Packaged: 2019-10-23 05:20:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17677154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Duck_Life/pseuds/Duck_Life
Summary: Trapped in her Penance form, Monet yearns to connect with Jubilee.





	sharp and silent

Your skin is hard, and sharp, and you’ve been invulnerable since you were 13 but this is different, is painful, is isolating. No one can touch you without getting hurt. The Irish man slices up his hands trying to help you, and you’ve never felt like more of a —

< _ Monster _ .>

The boy with the exploding face calls you that affectionately, like a nickname, means it in the sense of  _ We share this, we’re going through this together _ , and you can’t explain how that makes you feel.

You can’t explain anything, can’t speak, can’t cry out. You are left without a voice like the movie with the mermaid. 

The girl who makes fire come out of her hands, she speaks to you, spends time with you, asks you questions you can’t respond to. Every day you feel trapped in silence, feel it pressing down on you, and then the girl with the fireworks comes and sits with you and fills up all the silence. She talks and talks and talks, about TV shows and magazines and malls, about the X-Men and New York City and which celebrities are hooking up. She chatters and babbles and everything she says is punctuated by the popping of her gum, and she doesn’t seem to mind that you can’t say anything back. 

The girl has a name— Jubilation— and she has another name, Jubilee, but you can’t say either. You can’t say anything. 

There were times, in the past, when you would get quiet, just like little Claudette. Sometimes you focus on whatever you’re working on so much that the rest of the world feels far away, like looking through a veil. You could speak when you wanted to, though. And now Marius has taken that away. 

They all want to help you, Banshee and the boy with the exploding face and the White Queen. Even your sisters, who are trying to fill your shoes as best they can, the only way they know how. They want to help you.

Jubilee doesn’t. Not that she’s cruel or mean, but she just doesn’t see the need. She doesn’t want to help you. She just wants to be friends. 

You find yourself, in your darkest nights, thinking about what it would be like to touch her. To hold her hand. To brush her consistently uncombed hair out of her face, to cup her cheek in your palm. 

It’s a fantasy, though, a terrible, selfish, evil fantasy, because if you were to touch her you would cut her up just like you did Banshee. Your horrible, sharp fingers would make her bleed, and she would never look at you as a friend again. 

So you content yourself with sitting by her, watching her, listening to her. You have become so still and silent, and she is so loud, so full of life, always teetering on the edge of a new adventure. 

She gets roped into escapades with the others, each more dangerous than the last, and you wish you could protect her. Wish you could wrap your arms around her without hurting her. She sits beneath a tree on the property, beside you, just talking and making jokes and letting the sun bathe her in dappled yellow and gold. 

You ache to put a hand on her arm, to hold her, to see if her skin feels as soft as it looks. You even find yourself raising your arm, reaching out, before stopping with a sickening lurch in your stomach. Touching her means causing her pain. Holding her means hurting her. You are all sharp edges, like razors, but Jubilee doesn’t act like she’s afraid of you.

Don’t ruin that.

You can’t speak. Sometimes it’s hard even to think in normal sentences. You wish you could project pictures the way the little pink boy does. All you can do is sit and watch the world go by. 

You make up lists in your head of all the things you wish you could say to Jubilee. First, you would thank her for the apples, and then tell her to stop bringing them because you’re sick of them. You are a girl, not a horse.

Second, you’d tell her how important she is to you. How, in this ugly, awful twist of fate, she is like a gemstone sparkling in the dirt. A vein of shining crystal deep in the sludge and muck of the world. 

Being silent forces you to become a good listener. You listen, rapt, to everything Jubilee tells you. She tells you about the mall, and Australia, and Wolverine. She tells you the X-Men stories that make her seem cool and adventurous, but she also tells you the X-Men stories that make her seem human and small and scared. 

You wish you could tell her that she deserves a soft hand to hold and a soft shoulder to lay her head upon. And you wish, more than anything, that that soft hand and shoulder could be yours.

You are sitting beside Jubilee in the grass, and the sun glints off your ruby red skin, and the sun makes Jubilee look radiant. You forget yourself for a moment, lean closer to her with her hands braced on the ground, and your sharp sharp fingers shear at the grass like a scythe, leaving you with handfuls of grass.

And you don’t know what to do.

Apparently, Jubilee does. She grins and plucks at the grass with her own hands, pulls it up in clumps and then dumps it unceremoniously on top of your spiked head. 

After a moment’s hesitation, you take your handfuls of grass, and you do the same, leaving grass sticking out haphazardly from her untamed hair, and she laughs, and laughs, and laughs.

Even if you can never touch her, you can make her smile. 

 


End file.
